


...im talking about evil

by bemuse



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: (It’s Eve so that’s kind of a given), Canonical Character Death, Eve Polastri POV, Eve neglecting her work in favor of obsessing over a female assassin, Eventual Romance, F/F, Non graphic description of dead bodies/crime scenes, Obsession
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-02-27 21:50:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18747775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bemuse/pseuds/bemuse
Summary: Eve finds Villanelle for the first time in a dead man’s glassy eyes. Something in her chest pulses and she thinksnice to meet you.Or Love, in three stages.





	1. it blooms

**Author's Note:**

> Title (as well as chapter titles) from “Glass, Irony, and God” by Anne Carson.
> 
> “...I’m talking about evil  
> It blooms.  
> It eats.  
> It grins.”

Eve is just a rookie when she gets her first taste. She’s bored of the job practically from day one, so Eve does was Eve does best: snoop. 

It’s easier said than done, she’s been locked out of two servers and gone to talk to HR four times for looking through other people’s cubicles in her first three weeks.

She finally catches a break talking to Bill, the only person she likes so far, when the microwave beeps and he goes to take his curry out. When he leaves his stack of Manila folders on her desk, Eve can’t help but peak inside the first one. And then she throws aside pretense, opening the folder and pulls the contents out, and meets the second person she likes at work.

They’re only photos, shaky ones at that. (How do you get to be a crime scene photographer for the British government and not know how to focus a camera?) Even if she has to squint, Eve can see a then-unnamed-assassin all over the scene. Her wide gate is in the bumps in the carpet, the wider swing of her arm in the broken window and her long, cold fingers in the red lines running around the victims throat. 

It’s a clean introduction by Villanelle‘s standards. There is little flare, so little that it could almost have been someone else. 

Almost. 

There are little things, like the tea cup and coaster set carefully on the floor next to the upturned coffee table, but it’s mostly the way the victim is positioned: on his side, hands folded underneath his head, blanket from the hall closet draped over his shoulder. 

It’s childish really. A mimicry of sleep that reminds Eve of putting her dolls to bed. Their wide open eyes staring up at her sightlessly. 

The feeling that rises in her stomach now, looking at the body of a government contractor strangled to death in his own living room, is incomparable, insurmountable to the one that comes with seeing the traces of his killer in the crime scene. She returns the photos to the folder before Bill comes back with his curry, feeling irrational. She’ll blame curiosity when he asks about the folder in her top desk drawer two days later. 

It’s not a lie, not really. She was curious, but she found something in those pictures.

Eve finds Villanelle for the first time in a dead man’s glassy eyes. Something in her chest pulses and she thinks _nice to meet you_. 

—

Eve doesn’t even know she’s doing it until Bill points it out. 

They’re in the office at the end of the day, waiting for Elena to get out of the bathroom so they can go to the pub. 

He peaks over her shoulder at the open file on her desk, opened to a wide lens view of a dead diplomat lying on the floor of a deli and says “this another one to add to your cork board?” 

“What?” Eve says.

“The cork board where you have your master female assassin conspiracy mapped out.”

Eve rolls her eyes. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just because I think this high profile assassination could have been _executed_ by the same assassin as a few others.” 

“I see what you did there but I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of laughing,” Bill says, even though he’s smiling.

“Aw.”

And that should be the end of it. Elena finally comes out of the bathroom. She says _I hope you guys are ready to get as tipsy as is acceptable for a work day_. Bill and Eve laugh. They all walk out of the office and head to the pub, avoiding Frank on the way. But here’s the thing, even respectably buzzed, Eve can’t stop thinking about the assassin, Eve’s assassin, as Bill called her. And how Eve honestly believes she is behind no less than 10 high profile assassinations in the last two years. 

On the way home, only stumbling a little, Eve stops at an office supply store. She stands in front of the cork boards for a full minute before deciding on a more inconspicuous binder.

—

6 months and two unsolved assassinations later, the binder - now overflowing with content - becomes a flash drive and then a cleverly titled “PORN” folder on Eve’s work computer. 

The mental picture of her assassin is still fuzzy.  
There are a dozen cases, circling around in her head. Now she knows the assassin’s steady hands, her varying degrees of careful and reckless steps (likely dependent on whether or not the target is still alive when she takes them, or possibly, as Eve is beginning to suspect, how bored she is with the whole process). There is a crime scene photo from Naples of a business man’s bathroom. The body is lying in the tub. It’s been arranged, some - but not all - of her other targets are. This one has arms crossed in an x over his chest, like he’s already in the coffin. 

If anyone knew about Eve’s research they may ask how she could possibly tie all these cases together with their loosely defined similarities. But Eve has an ace up her sleeve. 

_In her mind's eye, alongside the sharpening image of her assassin, is a scene with Eve in front of every superior she has (and some more impressive looking ones she’s just made up). They’re dubious of her theory, they don’t believe her. Until she shows them the eyes._

_Every target, every single one, stares straight ahead. None closed or shifted or unfocused, and Eve knows she knows that on the other side of that gaze is the assassin she has been tracking for years now._

_Everyone is suitably impressed and Eve is gratified or prompted or respected or a combination, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Eve was right… and also catching an international assassin, that too, also really important stuff, of course_.

Eve looks at the Naples photo again. Her eye is drawn to the bottom right corner. There is a lipstick stain on the mirror, bubble gum pink. She thinks about the lips that pressed it there. How she had to bend over the sink basin on the tips of her toes (or maybe not depending on her height), press her lips to the mirror straight on. Eve thinks about how they must have stuck, just a bit, pictures the shape behind that imprint, the pull that exposes her even pinker inner lip.

Eve touches her own lower lip, resting her fingers between the inside and outside of it, feeling the moisture gathering under her fingertips. 

Something pulses in her chest. And then, it blooms.


	2. it eats

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section took a bit longer than I was anticipating, especially for being relatively canon compliant. 
> 
> Additional inspiration from this line from the Anne Carson (there may be a theme here) translation of Agamemnon Act I:  
> “Instead I mumble  
> I gnaw myself  
> I lose hope  
> And my mind is burning”

The nurse she meets in the bathroom is just some woman who looked at Eve for a minute too long. Until she isn’t.

After a witness dies in her arms and Eve gets fired and then, unofficially, rehired, Eve is looking through a catalog of hospital staff. She closes her eyes and sees the face that isn’t there. The eyes, wide and dark, staring at Eve with a hardness that doesn’t belong to an emergency care nurse. 

She comes into work the next day giddy. Thinking about fate and destiny and all the dramatic ways the next meeting could play out. And maybe she’s a little high on the rush of it. Eve can admit that the description she gives the sketch artist may be… exaggerated or rose colored or indicative of a delusioned parasocial relationship. But those eyes were real and just as depthless as Eve knew they would be. 

Kenny shows her a black and white mug shot from a Russian prison database a few days later.

Oksana Astankova looks beat up, pissed off, and clearly years younger that the nurse who gave Eve a twitch of a smile in the hospital bathroom and said “keep it down.” (Was it a code? Did the placement of Eve’s hair have some greater significance? Did she really think it looked good like that?) But her eyes are the same blank slate, same untouchable yet in control gaze that twists Eve’s stomach every time they meet hers.

-

Villanelle gives the name Eve Polastri in Berlin. It only makes Eve’s hopes soar. 

It’s flattering, really. 

Even if she’s the only one who thinks so and Bill says she’s gone from cork board conspiracy theorist to hair collecting super fan. (And so what if Eve has a few strands of what is presumably Villanelle’s hair in a ziplock bag at home, it’s not like anyone else was using it.)

She knows it’s probably a threat or a warning. At the very least it’s a message that Eve should back off. Even Carolyn looks put off when she says it. But Eve is sitting in her desk, nodding along and fighting back a grin. 

The master assassin she’s been tracking for years knows _Eve‘s_ name. Not Carolyn or Frank or Bill. Eve. 

Finally _somebody_ recognizes that she’s a real asset here, that she’s put work into this: long, difficult, grueling work. Ideally it wouldn’t be the target herself, but well, it’s not that bad either. 

Really what it is, is gratifying that the assassin Eve has seen in so many crime scenes is saying _nice to meet you too_.

Eve goes to Berlin feeling good about herself, even when she loses her suitcase. Like a real secret agent, chasing criminals and engaging in espionage. For the first time in a long time, she’s having fun.

But it’s something else, something worse and sinking in her chest, when Eve watches Villanelle stab Bill under the strobe lights of that club.

-

Eve isn’t stupid. She couldn’t be, she reminds herself, to have gotten this far. 

So why did she forget the assassin she was hunting was dangerous? Why is she sitting here at her best friends funeral, listening to their former boss list off lie after lie about Bill, while his daughter cries in the front pew? 

Eve isn’t stupid but maybe, if she was, it’d be easier to forgive herself.

-

When Villanelle holds a gun to her own head, Eve is scared. More than she was when the first shot nearly hit her foot. More than she has any right to be after what Villanelle has done. 

She doesn’t have a good reason, really. She can’t justify why she wouldn’t be relieved with Villanelle dead. 

Later she can rationalize it as professional investment or basic decency or something. She can say that they know now that Villanelle is just a low rung on a very tall latter. And she will justify it that way, to herself, to Carolyn, to Niko. 

But in the moment, looking into Villanelle’s eyes, Eve can’t lie. In her gut she feels it, the gnawing teeth of an entirely selfish fear.

The resounding _no_ that echoes into silent begging _don’t let this end, don’t let the most important thing in my life be over now_. 

Because she is. 

Villanelle, an internationally wanted assassin who didn’t so much as blink before she slid a knife into Bill’s ribs, is more important to Eve than her friends or her husband or even her job. And it frustrates Eve to no end because she had a good life, she really did. But nothing in it satisfied her quite like Villanelle. Nothing demands her attention like Villanelle does.

But really none of that even matters anyway because when Villanelle pulls the barrel back and laughs, Eve thinks maybe she doesn’t know her assassin at all.

(And later, much much later, when Villanelle says, “the only thing that makes you interesting is me,” Eve realizes that Villanelle is the one who really knows _her_.)

Back in her little cubicle, looking at her professional cork board covered in everything Villanelle, Eve pushes the thought out of her mind.

-

For all the jokes and snide remarks about it, Eve really hadn’t thought of her relationship with Villanelle as romantic. That is, until they have dinner together.

Eve is in the dress that Villanelle sent her, when Villanelle arrives and chases her around for fifteen minutes. 

Villanelle almost drowns her in the tub. _Just like the business man_ she thinks. 

Villanelle holds a knife to Eve’s throat in the kitchen. _Just like the diplomat_.

Villanelle puts her hands against Eve’s throat and Eve has to stop making comparisons because her blood is roaring too loud to hear her own thoughts.

She looked hot in the mirror earlier, but after that chase Eve is wet with tap water and no longer in the mood to be sexy. 

She changes into a sweater, which Villanelle is surprisingly cordial about, allowing Eve the privacy to change with her back to her. Cordial until they sit back down and Villanelle begins what appears to be a dramatic monologue only to come up short and shit on Eve’s dry clothes. 

But of all the indignities that come with that dinner, Eve is least willing to stand the lie Villanelle tells her. 

She’s sitting there, spouting nonsense about not wanting to kill like- like Eve doesn’t even _know_ her, hasn’t seen what she’s done from sheer boredom, hasn’t been eye to eye with her targets.

Eve says “I don’t believe you,” and everything about Villanelle melts away. 

Except the eyes, because it’s always the eyes that shoot something hair raising under Eve’s skin. They remind Eve that this is a killer at the same time as they remind her that this is someone she’s known since the beginning. 

Despite the doubts Eve has about the rest of her, Eve knows Villanelle’s eyes.

-

When they’re laying face to face in Villanelle’s Paris flat, part of Eve really is ready to let it all go. Every grudge, every friend, every normal piece of her life if it means she can stop pretending and stay in Villanelle’s empty eyes.

Eve’s exhausted, she’s poured her heart out to a killer and she should be more upset, with herself, with Villanelle. But right now, all she feels is relieved, relaxed and a little horny. 

That part of her, most of her, can believe, laying together like this, that nothing outside the two of them means anything. She’s going to kiss - maybe fuck - Villanelle and she doesn’t really care what that means beyond the returned attentions of the woman Eve has dedicated her life to.

But, well, there’s a knife in her hand too. An ill placed one at that. 

The smaller part of Eve that isn’t thinking about sex is thinking about revenge. And it’s been going back and forth, she guesses, on how willing she is to kill Villanelle. 

One moment Eve is massaging a knife handle by her thigh and looking at Villanelles lips. The next she plunged it into the other woman’s stomach and raging over the destruction Villanelle has rought on her life.

(Villanelle changes Eve’s mood on the breeze, but now Eve thinks, staring into those even more wide than usual eyes, it may not be a secret assassin superpower, so much as it is some kind of gravity bringing them both together, again and again.)

Eve stabs Villanelle. 

She monologues for a good minute and then, when nothing else out of a movie happens, she realizes she’s made a horrible mistake. 

It gnaws at Eve’s stomach. When she looks at the hole in Villanelle’s, it eats.


End file.
